Show HN: Napster.fm, Napster reimagined for the modern Web

http://napster.fm/

by buu700 • 13 years ago

39 34 13 years ago

napster.fm

Toshio2• 13 years ago

The title should be:

"Rick-rolling, reimagined for the HN crowd."

ihuman2• 13 years ago

You can select other songs; the default when you first start is a rickroll.

Toshio2• 13 years ago

I tried looking for "22" by Taylor Swift, song not found.

jamesgagan• 13 years ago

Pretty sure not displaying the video is a violation of the YouTube API TOS: https://developers.google.com/youtube/terms

Also have a feeling the owners of the napster trademarks won't like your domain name much!

chime• 13 years ago

So then it is exactly like the original Napster, reimagined for the web.

alpb• 13 years ago

Haha this was so good.

NotUncivil• 13 years ago

Perhaps you could build something like this using a social network known to be pirate-friendly, e.g., VK.com, as the music source?

epenn• 13 years ago

Ryan, I would strongly encourage you to rename this. For obvious reasons.

DanBlake3• 13 years ago

This wont last very long. Youtube is serious about enforcing the size limit on their videos. They actively contact people who do this type of thing and block their IP/API access.

They find out about it in 2 ways: 1: When a youtube employee notices it manually 2: When automated API's detects there are no ad clicks.

Also, using the napster brand is stupid. That company still exists and would be thrilled to take your domain : http://www.napster.com/

tuxidomasx• 13 years ago

How would they do this for client-side applications? I made a desktop application that essentially streams & rips (to mp3) Youtube videos but doesn't show any of the video data at all-- never had any issue with blocking or limits.

To do so would mean blocking regular browser access too (since the app behaves like a browser, even to the level of requesting other page resources). I imagine it would be difficult to tell the difference using heuristics.

DanBlake3• 13 years ago

It does not work for desktop applications, since all the requests come from clients IP. If your product got popular enough, I am sure they would send you with legal motivation to stop.

earbitscom• 13 years ago

Just fyi, this is 100% broken on my galaxy s3.

buu7008• 13 years ago

Yep, that's my bad. I forgot to put in a redirect for mobile devices to another page explaining that they weren't yet supported, but I'll throw something up now.

volaski• 13 years ago

So... you're saying it's like Napster because it's open source? No matter how you want to package it, when you build something on top of a centralized system or content source, it's called building a castle on sand.

buu7008• 13 years ago

So... you're saying it's like Napster because it's open source?

Well, no; I didn't say that. Napster wasn't open source, as far as I know.

sauerbraten• 13 years ago

I get this blue ball spinning and spinning and nothing happens... Chrome 26.0.1410.63 on Ubuntu 12.04.2.

Also, the name is not really fitting.

buu7008• 13 years ago

That's odd; I've actually been primarily developing/testing this on Chrome/Ubuntu. How long did you wait for the application to fully load? It usually takes ~5 seconds.

(I'm hoping this ends up being better feedback on my UX than my performance, because the site randomly not loading at all would definitely be a problem.)

The name was chosen because Napster.fm is meant to be a very close approximation of the Napster UI design and feature set (and then some).

weego• 13 years ago

locked my firefox, concerned brow, and pressed back as fast as I could.

buu7008• 13 years ago

Sorry? I'm not sure exactly what you mean, but the application does usually take ~5 seconds to fully load.

Aaronneyer• 13 years ago

So to show it's more modern, you take the name add .fm...

Alright then

buu7008• 13 years ago

So to show it's more modern, you take the name add .fm...

No, I don't believe that there is anything about the .fm TLD which in and of itself implies modernity.

shacharz• 13 years ago

I'd call it video-free youtube

diziet• 13 years ago

https://www.youtube.com/disco works a lot better at this point

buu7008• 13 years ago

Looks interesting, thanks. I'll have to look more into that and see if it could be a useful path to adding in "radio" functionality (one thing I'd really like to see in Napster.fm at some point).

oms1005• 13 years ago

I don't know about that. Click on Eminem, which is one of their options, and you see "No results found for 'Eminem'."

imperialdrive• 13 years ago

did we all just get rick-rolled like that?!!!

buu7008• 13 years ago

Yes.

dbz• 13 years ago

I don't see how this is reimagined. It offers nothing that spotify or soundcloud doesn't. It's also slower, but you're on the front page of HN, so that's forgivable, but I wouldn't wait 10 seconds for something to load if I wanted to use it regularly and there were great alternatives (check out soundcloud). There are much much more important features in a music player than real-time syncing.

nnnnni• 13 years ago

Grooveshark is also good

yashodhan• 13 years ago

I too am nostalgic about my Napster days. But if what others are saying is true, that either YouTube or Napster will come after you, I think you could've been a bit smarter about this.

Also, have you considered using the Grooveshark API?

Show HN: Napster.fm, Napster reimagined for the modern Web

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